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Ask HN: Hacker-friendly, simple e-commerce solution?
15 points by _1tan on April 18, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments
Shopify is questionable, eBay not ideal, Magento too heavy. What do you recommend?

Use case: Selling a few, simple physical products online. Ideally with some sort of subscription support.



Woocommerce. It just works. Dont over think it. Tome deciding is time not selling.


This. WooCommerce is very well designed and has an excellent plugin ecosystem as well. Yes it is WordPress but if you are looking for something open source and self hosted, it is the easiest to get started with and has great documentation. For subscriptions, they have a paid plugin but it is totally worth it (used it for many years and works like a charm


Yup. Made good money from it and have helped others as well.


Time dealing with security vulnerabilities, hacks or performance issues is also time not selling.

I would recommend everyone steer well clear of Wordpress.


Used Shoop in the past. A Django based magento like system. Pretty flexible and saw some good development.


You mean https://github.com/shuup/shuup ? It does seem nice, been looking for an e-commerce app that isn't written in PHP for ages. Thanks!


Correct! Shuup, was a couple of years ago.



Why is Shopify questionable?


I don't know about OP but they did lie to me to get me to sign up to a paid plan, then told me what I was asking for was actually not supported.


I'd like to avoid vendor lock-in. Additionally the way Shopify caters to audiences like dropshipping entrepreneurs is putting me off.


Scipio ERP is very hackable and free. https://www.scipioerp.com


I would love to know what other choices HN recommends as well.

I'm at the stage of choosing such a service as well.

I would add woocommerce to that list.



Big Commerce.

I wrote a lot of custom themes/scripts for it when I started freelancing.


Prestashop could be what you are looking for.


What problems does Shopify pose?




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